1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to point cloud editing systems and methods, particularly to a system and a method for filtering a point cloud.
2. Description of Related Art
Product quality has long been one of the most important factors in maintaining manufacturing enterprises competitiveness. Improving the product quality is an important ongoing pursuit of the manufacturing enterprises. It is essential to verify component correctness and accuracy of various manufactured products. There is now a burgeoning need to verify components of products rapidly and precisely. Nevertheless, many manufacturing enterprises still perform verification by employing numerous manual tasks and test programs that are non-standard. This can seriously affect the accuracy and consistency of the verification performed.
In recent years, with performances of computer hardware and software continually improving, computers play a major role when performing verification operations on an object. Computer equipment can greatly improve the efficiency and accuracy of verification. For example, a scanning device scans an object to be verified to obtain a point cloud, and inputs the point cloud to the computer to form a digitalized figure of the object. The object will be verified by analyzing and processing the point cloud by executing particular software installed in the computer. The art of analyzing and processing data on an object is disclosed in patents such as U.S. Pat. No. 6,738,727, entitled System and Methods for Analyzing and Processing data on an object. This invention can automatically measure the object and help to guide production by comparing the measurement data with the design data. The system comprises an automatic scanning and measuring sub-system for obtaining point cloud by scanning the object and generating measurement data on the object by processing the point cloud.
Even though the above-described system discloses how to obtain a point cloud, there are many noise points mixed within the point cloud, usually, 0.1%˜5%. The noise points would influence the processing speed and accuracy of the point cloud.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method for filtering a point cloud, which is capable of filtering the point cloud automatically and accurately.